Notice: This will mean relatively little to most of you. If you wish, think of it as a bit of insight into how my mind allegedly works, or of the things that fascinate me.

Far back in the reaches of my childhood I stumbled across a book by Gene Wolfe titled The Shadow of the Torturer. I suspect that I got it due to having forgotten to return a postcard to the Science Fiction Book Club, in which case it was one of the most fortuitous errors of my life. This was the first volume of the Book of the New Sun tetralogy, an astonishingly intricate series set so far in the future that not only has our era vanished from memory, so have the tens of thousands of years following us. It is a brilliant series – dark, mythic, perceptive – told by a somewhat unreliable narrator. The books have rightly taken their place as classics of twentieth century literature.

However, the first time I read through each book, I was immediately certain of two things: that it was one of the most brilliant works I’d ever read, and that I would need to read it several more times to begin to grasp its full elegance.¹

Sortly after encountering TBotNS I came across a copy of Samuel R. “Chip” Delany’s stunning novel, Dahlgren. I still have the battered and coverless mass-market paperback edition where I initially read this story of the badly damaged and broken reality centered on an American city named Bellona. Time has stopped working in a normally comprehensible fashion, occasionally there are two moons in the sky, and the US government has blockaded the bridges into and out of the city – if you really want to go in the National Guard won’t stop you, but leaving is not another matter. Entirely new social structures have formed in the vacuum left by the flight of the civic leaders, meaning that the majority Black population is proving itself to be as generally incompetent as the prior white government was. It’s also chock-a-block with explicit sex in all configurations of two or more individuals, which simultaneously distracted my late-teen early-twenties self from the main “plot” while pulling me deeper into the mindset of the unreliable and befuddled narrator. As I completed my first read-through – it starts mid-drntence and concludes back where it began – I once again knew that I was in the presence of an unimaginably brilliant novel which I was far too stupid to comprehend in a single.²

Much more recently I came across what’s now known as the Area X trilogy, or The Southern Reach, by the genius Jeff VanderMeer. It’s the most overtly literary of the books mentioned, skilfully playing with perspective, form, and structure to tell the story of humanity’s contact with… an event that has occurred in the southern US. (It might be in the Florida Panhandle, but then, it’s never specified.) The three books are Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance: the first is the best known, having been turned into a fascinating film by the same title that isn’t very concerned with retaining plot consistency with the novel. The film’s director – Alex Garland of Ex Machina and 28 Days Later – wisely opted to write a film about the images that stayed with him after reading the book, focusing on the dreamlike state it induced in him.

Once again, these are utterly amazing books which require and reward multiple readings. VanderMeer³ has written quite a few other remarkable works, seamlessly melding surrealism, science fiction, and literary fiction in a way that few other authors would dare to attempt, let alone succeed so seemingly effortlessly.

So, why am I bringing these all up together? For one they achieved something that rarely occurs – they all made me feel incredibly ignorant on first reading, but never in a condescending way. As a result I made the effort and was rewarded with not merely broadening my intelligence, but in making me a better person with the effort.

But also (and perhaps less pretentiously), they are incredibly original, thoughtful, and engrossing works of world-building. I won’t drag out some hoary cliché like “If you loved Game of Thrones…” because that would be bullshit. No shade is intended toward GRRM, but these aren’t the same kind of books. There is an intricacy to them that goes beyond names and lineages and prophecies; these concern themselves with how we perceive reality and the passage of time, of what it truly means to be human, and our place in the so-called “natural order of things”.

These are stories that could teach you something about yourself, should you be open to listening. However, they are also fantastic, gripping stories for their own sake, too.

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¹ This work is dense and respected enough that there are ancillary books and articles published about it on a regular basis.

² I had the opportunity to speak briefly with Delany at the Miami Book Fair some years back. Not only did I get to have a new, corrected edition signed, but I also got to experience what a warm and gracious gentleman he is in person.

³ I’ve never met VanderMeer, but I have it on good authority (pun unintended) that’s he’s a great guy. (So sayeth the Danie Ware.) He maintains an active – and very funny – social media presence, too, mainly on Twitter. I strongly suspect that he would be one hell of a dining companion.

If you have any interest in any of these, they’re all easy to find. The Book of the New Sun, Dahlgren, and Area X series are all available on Audible, for those who prefer to listen. Let me know what you think.